Tweet This

If you were one of the millions of people who saw Guns N’ Roses perform on the Use Your Illusion Tour in the early 1990s, you are well familiar with the sense of danger that made the show so exciting. You were in for a rock n’ roll concert and possibly much more.

For example, at a show in Stockholm, the band didn’t take the stage until after 11:00 p.m. Then singer Axl Rose insulted the audience. “If you’re bored,” he told them, “You should’ve saved your money and gone and seen the fireworks tonight.” Which is where he had been instead of at the show. A few days later in Copenhagen, he stopped the show for 15 minutes because an audience member had thrown a firecracker onto the stage. At a show in St. Louis, Rose got worked up about a fan with a video camera, threw his microphone down, and stomped off the stage. The crowd rioted and tore the building apart, racking up more than $200,000 in damages.

According to Craig Duswalt, who was Axl Rose’s personal assistant during the Use Your Illusion tour, that sense of danger verged on panic behind the scenes. “There was a sense of urgency at every show. Is Axl going to come? Is he going to be on time? What time are we getting there?” Duswalt recalls. Duswalt is the author of a new memoir, Welcome to My Jungle: An Unauthorized Account of How a Regular Guy Like Me Survived Years of Touring with Guns N’ Roses, Pet Wallabies, Crazed Groupies, Axl Rose’s Moth Extermination System, and Other Perils on the Road with One of the Greatest Rock Bands of All Time.

Duswalt claims that Rose’s behavior was never caused by disrespect to the fans. “The myth is that they’re always late, they don’t care about their audiences, their fans, because they go on late,” Duswalt told me. “But the reality is they do care about their fans, so much so that Axl wanted to put on the best show possible. That’s why sometimes he was late because he was not ready to go at the drop of a hat. He had to prepare and sometimes it took longer for him to get into the mindset to put on what he feels is the best show.”

The mindset that Rose had to get into was in fact a state of frenzy, because he carried the weight of delivering the Gun N’ Roses experience on stage. And that experience was all about intensity, danger, violence and mayhem. It was what the fans came for. Axl Rose told journalist Mick Wall in 1990, referencing prize fighter Mike Tyson’s biography Bad Intentions, “I relate what I do to what Tyson says about when he punches someone in the head. He says he imagines hitting ‘em so hard his fist knocks their nose bone right back into their brains. He says when he goes in the ring he does it with bad intentions. Well, that’s like me getting ready to start something, like going onstage. And you gotta make sure when you knock ‘em down they stay down.” Turning the rage on or off was not always easy.

Another myth that Duswalt confronts in his book is that Guns N’ Roses partied all the time. “Don’t get me wrong, they partied,” he says. “But, before a show, Axl would warm up for an hour in the shower doing vocal exercises. He would get a massage, he would get adjusted by a chiropractor. He would tape up his ankles because he ran around so much. He prepared for two-and-a-half to three hours before a show. And then after each show he would go back into the shower and warm down his voice for a half hour.” Not surprisingly, a recent study revealed that Axl Rose has the widest vocal range of any popular music singer, wider even than Adele or Mariah Carey.

Duswalt now conducts seminars and workshops for entrepreneurs and small business owners. One of the lessons he teaches them from his days with Guns N’ Roses is that no matter how successful they are, they have to maintain and update their skills and they have to be extremely disciplined. “These rock stars are at the top of their game and they still do the basics every single day. That’s what we have to do as business people as well.”

Axl Rose's lateness and onstage volatility wasn’t just about him entering his onstage character. It was also about maintaining the brand. “Guns N’ Roses were known as the bad boys in rock n’ roll,” Duswalt says, “And a great marketing thing is that they were very good at being the bad boys in rock ‘n’ roll.” In his workshops, Duswalt uses Guns N’ Roses to teach the importance of writing a mission statement and sticking to it. “They said, ‘We’re just going to be the baddest boys in rock n’ roll,’ and they certainly acted like it. And that’s what attracted people. Even if you didn’t like Guns N’ Roses, people came to their concerts to see what was going to happen because so many things went wrong at the concerts. Is Axl going to do the whole show. Is he going to stay on stage? Is he going to run off stage and leave? Is there going to be a riot tonight? People wanted to see the spectacle of it as well.”